(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)

This was recommended to me by a friend of mine, Chicago bizarro author David David Katzman, specifically because of the growing influence it's apparently having these days on all lovers of the surreal; because for those who don't know, Fernando Pessoa was sort of the Portuguese version of Franz Kafka, a white-collar worker in Lisbon during the Early Modernist era of the 1910s through '30s, who barely published anything during his own lifetime but left behind over 25,000 pages of brilliantly obtuse work after his death. In fact, this particular novel wasn't even published for the very first time until 1982, which is why it's only now in the 2000s that it's starting to have a wide global influence for the first time, the pieces left by Pessoa in such a fragmented state that modern editors weren't sure what order the snippets should even appear. As you can imagine, then, this leaves the reading experience as a challenge to say the least, but a deeply rewarding one for the dedicated lover of experimentalism who can stick with it for the entire thing, as Pessoa weaves together observation with introspection, served with a healthy dose of cutting-edge style; and it's for sure destined to eventually become just as much a landmark of Early Modernist experimentation as T.S. Eliot or even Kafka himself. It comes recommended to those looking to expand their knowledge of this period of literary history, as well as fans of modern bizarro and gonzo fiction. ...more

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com:]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com:]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally.)

The CCLaP 100: In which I read a hundred so-called "classics" for the first time, then write essays on whether or not they deserve the label. The Age of Innocence is book number 29 in this series.

The story in a nutshell:To truly get the full implications of The Age of Innocence, it's of crucial importance to understand the following: that although it's set in 1870 (during the height of Victorianism), it wasn't written and published until fifty years later, in 1920 (the beginning of Modernism), an older Edith Wharton looking back on her youth but with a thoroughly contemporary eye. And the reason that's important is that the novel itself is a look at a New York that didn't exist anymore even in the year the book first came out, thus making it enjoyed from the first day for the same historical reasons we do here in the 21st century -- an impossibly quaint and provincial Manhattan that was still barely developed above 25th Street or so, where the only people to be found in the area now known as "Midtown" were a small incestuous circle of the upper-class, an American version of the old British aristocracy held together through such Atlantic Seaboard touchstones as business associations, Ivy League schools, summering in Newport, and family names that stretch back to the Mayflower. Back in the late 1800s, the area around what is now Central Park was still considered a far suburb of New York "proper" (that is, everything below Houston Avenue), the only people there this inbred group of old money, living in their gigantic mansions tucked within what was still at the time half-wilderness, and coming up with an elaborate set of rules and unspoken etiquette to determine how their entire complicated society would work (with the worst fate imaginable being collectively "snubbed" by the members of this clique, suddenly losing access to all the resources that made up your lifestyle in the first place, party invitations and club memberships and private boxes at the opera).

It's within this environment that we watch the fate of young forward-thinking chap Newland Archer, a true Victorian gentleman if there ever was one: educated, cultured, with a natural head for both business and science, even with a perfect if not old-fashioned fiancee, the bubbly and slightly dimwitted May Welland (youngest adult member of the Mingott clan, one of the "major families" holding this convoluted upper-class society together, with the grouchy and headstrong Mrs. Manson Mingott as its matriarch, holder of all the family's money and therefore all the family's power). But, see, Newland and his pals have been talking a lot recently about this so-called "New Woman," the redefinition of femininity that was taking place among educated youth during this period in history; a new understanding about marriage where young wives were expected to be not only as educated as their husbands, but also as political and as bawdy, spending their days protesting in the streets for suffrage and bringing their uninhibited desires to the boudoir at night. It's not that Newland doesn't love May, a fact that Wharton goes out of her way to show throughout the book; it's just that when he meets her cousin Ellen one night, aka "Countess Olenska" -- one of these New Women who ran off to Europe and married into the actual Prussian nobility, just to have the marriage fall apart and come slinking back to New York -- Newland suddenly realizes how much better a woman like her would be for his life, and how she sparks in him the kind of intelligent, world-weary passion that the domesticated, gender-role-believing May simply cannot. And this is another reason why the publishing date of this book is important, because the Modernist women at the beginning of the "Roaring Twenties" Jazz Age were dealing with this issue all over again -- the relationship between independence and personal identity and traditional romantic happiness -- and you can see this novel as just as much a comment about their situation as the one of the late Victorian Age, kind of like how Robert Altman's M*A*S*H is actually about Vietnam although set during the Korean War.

The majority of the book, then, concerns itself with the situation that develops between all these people in this hothouse environment, as Newland and Ellen come to realize their attraction to each other but hardly ever acknowledge it out loud, and also as the rest of this society comes to realize it too, and starts quietly deciding behind closed doors what exactly they're going to collectively do about it. And this is yet another reason that it's important to know about the schism between this book's setting and its publication; because instead of impulsively running off together and "living happily ever after," as would've happened in the breathy Victorian romances actually being written in the late 1800s, here all the parties involved come to a much more Modernist yet heartbreaking conclusion, that ultimately it just isn't fair of Newland and Ellen to destroy the lives of not only May but the entire Mingott family, just because there was bad timing involved as to who exactly met who in what exact order. Not only do Newland and Ellen come to realize this, but even May herself comes to understand just what kind of sacrifice the two make for her sake, leading to a resolution not exactly sad but not exactly happy either; so a thoroughly Modern story, in other words, even as at the end they watch this old elaborate caste system around them fall apart during the first few decades of the 20th century.

The argument for it being a classic:Well, for starters, it was the first-ever novel by a woman to win the Pulitzer, and is also mentioned in just about any list you come across of the greatest novels of all time (plus was adapted into a high-profile Martin Scorsese film in 1993, a controversial production among the book's fans, which doesn't hurt either). But awards and platitudes aside, argue its fans, there are two main reasons why The Age of Innocence should be considered a classic: because of the aforementioned complex way it combines Romanticism and Modernism, both nostalgically presenting the former while ingeniously mixing in the latter; and also because it was one of the first-ever truly perfect Realist stories ever written, a style of writing favored by such turn-of-the-century authors as Wharton and her good friend Henry James, which believe it or not was actually considered a cutting-edge literary theory at the time. After all, it was the immense popularity of this novel (almost from the day it was released) that was a big factor in Realism becoming such a dominant form of storytelling in contemporary novels, so dominant in fact that most of us no longer realize it even has a special name. (For those who don't know, Realism simply means "a story told in a way so that it sounds and feels like it could've actually happened in real life," and is the way that 95 percent of all contemporary novels are now written; this is compared to the habit during the Victorian Age for all novels to be either fairytales or to sternly preach a moral lesson impossible to actually live up to, or perhaps be a ridiculously unrealistic bosom-heaving love story.)

The argument against:Ironically, the biggest argument against The Age of Innocence seems to be just how much of an understanding one needs to have about the circumstances behind its publishing in order to grasp its full power; because if you don't know all the details I've thus far described, it's incredibly easy to see this book as just some outdated potboiler about how rich people suck, the exact attitude you tend to find among online reviews from people who didn't care for it. No matter how powerful the book itself might be, argue its critics, to drag around this much historical baggage violates the spirit of how we're defining "classic" in this essay series; that in order for a book to truly be considered such, it needs to transcend its specific original time period, so that anyone can pick it up randomly at any point in the future and still enjoy it for what it is. Even less than a hundred years since its original publication, argue its critics, The Age of Innocence threatens to no longer do this; and that's why it should certainly be considered both a historically important and well-done book, but not necessarily a timeless classic.

My verdict:So if you've ever asked yourself, "I wonder what the absolute oldest novels are to establish the kind of specific English we use today," a strong argument could be made for The Age of Innocence being one of them; that's what I kept thinking while reading it, anyway, that it's so far the oldest book in the CCLaP 100 to feel like it could've actually been written yesterday. (I mean, yes, Madame Bovary comes close, as far as capturing the literary spirit of our contemporary times; but Wharton's novel is so far the oldest to feel like you could literally slap a fake 2009 copyright notice on the front page and not make people even blink.) And that's because of a whole series of what turns out to be some pretty subtle details, things you see mentioned in essays about Wharton again and again: not just this brilliant mix of Romanticism and Modernism she pulls off, for example, but also an incredibly dry and dark sense of humor (this book is surprisingly funny, but only to those who like, say, 30 Rock or Arrested Development); the resigned acknowledgment among all the characters as to the cruel ironic nature of the world; even the plain-spoken language and simple sentence structure used (which after all was a major hallmark of the Realist writers, the insistence that language itself stay out of the way as much as possible of the actual story being told, versus the flowery purple-prose messes of the Victorian Age and older.)

The biggest secret, though, as to why The Age of Innocence is so enjoyable is because of the various levels at which it can be enjoyed; for example, one of the first and most obvious pleasures of the book is simply the sumptuous visual images of Old New York that Wharton conjures up, and if one wants they can easily enjoy this novel simply as a melodramatic piece of historical fiction, to lose oneself in the exquisitely remembered finery of Wharton's actual youth (although make no mistake, this is not an autobiographical novel -- Wharton was only ten or so in the years this book takes place). But then if you want, you can also enjoy the novel for the complex way it neither condemns nor approves this ridiculously elaborate code of behavior among this circle of upper-class acquaintances; this was the world Wharton herself quite happily lived in her entire adult life, after all, and there's a reason that she used to call this book her "apology" for her earlier, much more damning House of Mirth. (In fact, one of this book's strongest arguments is that maybe it's not so bad after all to stop yourself from ruining the lives of everyone around you, just because you get a boner from cynical girls with short haircuts who make bad life decisions and have spent time in Europe, and that there's maybe something actually to this elaborate set of etiquette that marked the "civilized height" of the Victorian Age.)

Now, that said, I also agree with the book's critics in at least one respect -- that if I hadn't studied up beforehand on both Wharton and the history of this book, I wouldn't have nearly enjoyed it in the nuanced way that I did, a clear violation of the spirit behind this CCLaP 100 series in the first place. Although it's still a small enough problem here in the early 2000s for me to confidently label the book a classic for all of us, I have a feeling that it's in its last days in history of being considered such, and that a mere fifty years from now it will be considered as badly dated as the work of such early Victorians as Nathaniel Hawthorne is now starting to more and more seem to us Obamian-Age citizens. After all, if there's one big surprise I've learned since starting this essay series, it's just how fluid our entire concept of "artistic classic" actually is; and although I happily call The Age of Innocence one at this particular moment in history, I'm not sure exactly how much longer this will be the case. Do yourself a favor and read it soon, since as a "grandchild of Modernism" you will be one of the last people in history to fully be able to appreciate it in all its subtle glory.

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally.)

The CCLaP 100: In which I read a hundred so-called "classics" for the first time, then write reports on whether they deserve the label

Book #19: Candida, by George Bernard Shaw (1898)

The story in a nutshell:As one of many "comedies of manners" from the Victorian- and Edwardian-era playwright George Bernard Shaw, the actual storyline of today's book under review is much slighter than normal; it is not much more than a breezy 50-page play about a middle-class couple living in the suburban edge of London at the turn of the 20th century, a liberal activist minister and his smart-as-a-tack wife (the "Candida" of the play's title), as well as the young moon-eyed artist they know who has fallen in love with Candida himself. The actual plotline, then, is not much more than that of this minister husband and artist wooer arguing humorously for an hour over which of them loves Candida more, and of what type of man she obviously most needs in her life; Candida herself finally puts an end to the argument by patiently explaining that she doesn't exactly need a man at all, and that the two of them are pretty much morons. Seriously, that's about the entirety of Candida just from a plot standpoint; the main reason to still read and enjoy this script, then, is mostly for the sparkling wordplay and attention to language Shaw brings to the story, as well as its razor-sharp look at the issues and details making up day-to-day life for the British middle-class during these years.

The argument for it being a classic:You can't even mention "classic literature" without bringing up Shaw, his fans claim; this was an artist, after all, who both wrote and published new material literally from the 1880s to 1940s, painting an indelible portrait of what was at the time the most literary society on the planet, right during the years that novels and plays were at their most popular with mainstream society in general. By the end of his life, Shaw was considered a literary superhero by most, to this day still the only person in history to win both a Nobel Prize and an Oscar; that makes a whole ton of his old work worth going back and revisiting, argue his fans, and not only that but also spread out evenly over the course of his remarkable 60-year career. Take 1898's Candida, for example; although not as polished, say, as a late-career classic like Saint Joan, nor as popular as something like Pygmalion (itself adapted into the insanely popular Broadway musical My Fair Lady), it nonetheless was one of the first really big hits of Shaw's career, as well as a great record of what the times were actually like for an average middle-class citizen during the end of the Victorian Age. As such, then, its fans say, Candida rightly deserves to still be read and enjoyed on a regular basis to this day.

The argument against:Of course, as we've all learned over the course of this "CCLaP 100" essay series so far, although Victorian and Edwardian literature still continues to be legible and readable to modern eyes, that's a long way from being entertaining or simply not tedious; and critics will argue that Shaw's work is especially guilty of clunky aging, precisely because he wrote about the issues and pumped out the kinds of light, frothy stories that were so popular with contemporary audiences at the time. In fact, you could almost view Shaw as a brilliant television writer more than anything else, in a time when the television industry didn't actually exist; he did crank out over 60 plays over the course of his career, after all, most of which last no more than an hour or so, most of which deal with the same slight plots and family trivialities of a typical B-level network drama on the air right now. If you take a cold, hard look at Shaw's work, critics say, you'll see that they're mostly valuable anymore as historical documents, as records of the times and of what the average citizen of those times found important, a big part of why he was so popular to begin with; the plays themselves, though, are badly dated relics of the Victorian and Edwardian times from which they came, the exact thing a modern show is satirizing anymore whenever you see one of the characters affect a fake stagey British accent and yell, "I say, Lord Wiggelbottom, what a surprise to see you here, old chap!" Shaw's plays are important, the argument goes, just not worth most people these days taking the time to sit down and actually read.

My verdict:I have to admit, today I very quickly fall on the side of Shaw's critics, and in fact we can take the printed book version of Candida itself as strong evidence; I find it very telling that of the 140-page manuscript, only 52 of those pages are needed to print the actual play, a whopping 88 pages instead devoted to notes about the play, Shaw's preface to the play, interviews about the play, letters Shaw wrote about the play, etc etc. Because it's definitely true -- there's barely anything to Shaw's actual plays themselves, certainly not the strong three-act structure loaded with suspense and drama like we expect anymore from our live theatre, with their 60-volume cumulative effect being much more important these days than any of the individual volumes themselves. (Want even more evidence? Check out Shaw's Wikipedia bio, and notice that no one's yet bothered creating separate entries for over half his plays, and this from a website that includes detailed plot recaps for every episode of every television show in human history.) I agree that the cumulative effect is important, I want there to be no mistake -- I agree that Shaw is one of the most important figures in the history of the English-language arts and letters, and I agree that there is just a ton of information to be mined from his work concerning real life in the British Empire during both its Industrial-Age height and its eventual downfall. But man, let me admit this as well -- sheesh, was Candida a freaking chore to actually get through. ("I say, Lord Wiggelbottom, what a surprise to see you here, old chap!") Perhaps some of his later, weightier, more mature work (which I definitely plan on tackling in the future) will turn out to be more worth the effort; for now, though, I reluctantly conclude that what is more entertaining for most audience audience members would be an interesting book about Shaw and his work, not the work itself.

(Since the beginning of 2008 I've been writing an ongoing series of essays here that I call the "CCLaP 100," whereby I read for the first time a hundr(Since the beginning of 2008 I've been writing an ongoing series of essays here that I call the "CCLaP 100," whereby I read for the first time a hundred books considered by many to be classics, and then write reports here on whether or not I think they deserve this label. For the complete list of books, as well as an explanation behind how the list was compiled, you can click here.)

The CCLaP 100: In which I read for the first time a hundred so-called "classics," then write reports on whether or not they deserve the label

Essay #69: The Thin Man (1934), by Dashiell Hammett

The story in a nutshell:Originally published in 1934 as what would turn out to be the last book of his career, Dashiell Hammett's The Thin Man essentially takes the premise of his earlier "hardboiled" detective stories and turns it on its head; it's the story of former hardboiled detective Nick Charles, who four years previous had actually managed to get a feisty yet upper-class socialite to marry him, and who retired from the gumshoe business in order to be the financial manager of her large inherited portfolio of assets (including real estate, working mines and more). But on a rare vacation to New York (his former stomping grounds before moving to San Francisco after the wedding), Nick finds himself pulled into a new investigation against his will, as a scheming middle-aged former client and her manipulative daughter practically beg him to look into the disappearance of the alimony-late divorced former patron of the family (the "thin man" of the book's title), then proceed to tell the press, the police, and all the man's former enemies that Charles is officially on the case even though he's not, causing most of the darkly comedic messes that follow; and with his wife Nora never having gotten to see Nick in action before, she gleefully does everything she can to up the chaos even more, a bloodlusty gleam in her eye every time a gangster pulls a gun on them or during any other kind of life-threatening situation they seem to constantly find themselves in. As with most crime novels, the event-filled plot is best left as much a surprise as possible; but needless to say that many cocktails are imbibed, many bon mots are quipped, many punches are thrown and many complications are caused by the Charles' disobedient dog; and in the end it all works out okay for our newly famous heroes Nick and Nora, paving the way for the many movie and TV sequels to come.

The argument for it being a classic:There are two main arguments for why this should be a classic, one more important among genre fans and one more often cited by academes; because to tackle the bigger and more famous argument first, crime fans say that Hammett essentially invented the hardboiled detective genre nearly singlehandedly, paving the way for what is now a billion-dollar industry and arguably the one most popular literary genre of them all here in the early 2000s. (Arguably!) Now, of course, there had already been lots of books before concerning the committing of crimes and the solving of them -- in fact, as we've seen earlier in this essay series, it was the early Victorians who invented the premise with their so-called "Newgate novels" (named for a famous London jail where many of these books were set), which after a public morals uproar morphed into "sensation novels" (in which the naughty fun of Newgate stories were mixed with the moodiness of Gothic literature, and moved into the realm of middle-class homes), which then eventually morphed into the noir and hardboiled genres we know today -- which brings us to the second, more academic argument for why this is a classic: that Hammett was one of the first crime writers to bring the clipped, slang-heavy, rat-a-tat writing style of Early Modernism to the genre, both inspiring and being inspired by such non-genre peers as Ernest Hemingway, Sinclair Lewis and Henry Miller, and basically bringing a kind of intellectual respect (if not the guilty-pleasure kind) to what had been the decidedly childish world of genre literature.

The argument against:Only one major one, but one that you see argued a lot; that Hammett simply wasn't a good enough writer to be considered for the classics canon, a ham-fisted semi-amateur who just happened to get popular because of accidentally being the first person to write in this hackneyed style, but who was easily superseded in quality by people like Raymond Chandler not even one generation later. Plus there's a minor argument as well that you see over and over from online critics -- that Hammett was the originator of the overly complicated crime-novel plot, a bad addition to this genre that essentially drove away an entire chunk of its former audience, and that led to the ridiculously convoluted "whodunit" storylines of most modern murder novels.

My verdict:So before anything else, let's just acknowledge that I should've actually reviewed Hammett's The Maltese Falcon if I had wanted a better look at what constituted the bulk of Hammett's career, in that The Thin Man is actually a lighthearted and comedic take on the overly serious, overly macho titles that make up most of his oeuvre; but it just so happens that I already read The Maltese Falcon when younger, and as regular readers remember, the entire original point of this CCLaP 100 series was to give me an excuse to read a hundred so-called classic novels that I never had before, simply so that I could become better informed as a book reviewer. And in fact, simply from a historical perspective, Hammett might be one of the most interesting writers I've come across yet in this essay series, because he tied together so many loose threads that existed in both the literary world and the popular culture in general, right at a time when these threads most needed tying together so to turn into something brand new for a "modern" time.

See, for those who don't know, even the concept itself of a "city police department" wasn't thought of for the first time until the 1830s; and until the 20th century, such police forces remained basically exercises in amateur buffoonery, leaving it to such cash-flush, discipline-heavy, forensics-obsessed private groups as the Pinkerton detective agency whenever a person actually needed a major crime solved. And Hammett just happened to have been a Pinkerton agent for years and years in his youth; so right at the beginning of the 20th century when these city police departments did finally start getting actually competent at their jobs, and all these former Pinkerton and other agents started going into business for themselves, shifting their focus to more domestic situations like philandering spouses and purloined jewelry, Hammett just happened to be in the exact right position and have the exact right experiences to start penning a series of stories romanticizing this new freelance activity, and it was his five novels and dozens of short stories that pretty much almost single-handedly established most of the "private eye" tropes we even think of anymore when we think of the genre.

I mean, yes, technically his critics are right, that Hammett's writing is overly pulpy and with overly complicated plots; but in many ways that's the entire point, that even the professor-loved Pulitzer winners of these years were adding such dramatic stylistic rebellions against Victorianism to their work, leading to the first time in the novel's history where the lowbrow and highbrow mixed so complexly that it was hard to tell them apart, which itself led both to the academic recognition of genre literature for the first time, and to the general shift in global literary dominance in those years to the United States (where this highbrow/lowbrow mixing largely took place, and became a source of endless fascination for culturally hamstrung European artists). It's the witty, fast-paced aspect of Hammett's work that is the very reason it should most be admired; and when combined with its profound effect on popular culture in general (like I said, Nick and Nora Charles eventually became the subjects of six extremely successful Hollywood movies and a 1950s television series, which then profoundly influenced nearly every other detective novel that came out in those years), plus Hammett's own tragically romantic real life (he lived for another 25 years after writing this, but medical problems exacerbated by his runaway alcoholism stopped him from finishing a single other book), is what leads me today to enthusiastically declare The Thin Man an undeniable classic that all of you should read at least once before you die.

(As of August 2014, I am selling a first American edition, first printing of this book through my arts center's rare-book collection [cclapcenter.com/(As of August 2014, I am selling a first American edition, first printing of this book through my arts center's rare-book collection [cclapcenter.com/rarebooks]. Here below is the description I wrote for the book's auction page at eBay.)

The early 20th century was a sneakily fascinating time in British literary history, mostly because of the British public really starting to wrestle for the first time with its role in colonialism, class and Empire, as seen in a series of authors at the time who tiptoed and danced around the subject without ever quite stating their opinions in a plain way. Take E.M. Forster for an excellent example, a closeted gay man who was hugely critical of class and race issues in his private life (and who turned down an honorary knighthood once he was old and famous), but who was forced to only subliminally talk about all these subjects through a series of novels that at first glance seem simply like frilly romance stories. This is most clearly seen in such late-period masterpieces as Howards End and A Passage to India, but all the elements are there even in his very first book, 1905's Where Angels Fear to Tread (not published in America until 1920, with a first print run of of only 2,630 copies), written when he was just 26 years old. Ostensibly one of those "European Grand Tour" novels so popular at the time (see for example Forster's American peer Henry James, who literally made an entire career out of such stories), at first glance it seems to be the simple tale of a young middle-class British widow who falls in love with a penniless Italian while on vacation one summer, with her shocked family attempting to take control of the couple's eventual child once the woman dies at an early age herself; but a more careful reading reveals just how much contempt Forster has for the prim, sheltered Herriton family at the center of the story, and by extension his disgust for any person who puts "proper appearances" at a higher priority than personal happiness, a running theme of his entire career that he would express in much more subtle and powerful ways in later books. An extra-valuable book merely from the fact that it was Forster's first, even at its premium price today one is getting a steal (copies in better condition and with the dust jacket intact go for ten times as much), a perfect acquisition for Forster fans and those who professionally collect historically important pieces of Edwardian literature....more

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com:]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com:]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally.)

Well well, so once again it's time for another edition of "Book Versus Movie," a concept I frankly ripped off from the Onion AV Club, in which I both read a book and see the movie based on that book in the same week, and end up writing mini-reviews of both at the same time. (Don't bother looking for the "Book Versus Movie" archive page, by the way -- you've only missed one other, concerning the Alan Moore comic From Hell.) And today's it's none other than The 39 Steps, with both a book and movie version that I've wanted to get exposed to for a long time now; the 1915 novella, after all, is one of the first spy stories ever written, while the 1935 movie was one of Alfred Hitchcock's first big hits, long before he moved to Hollywood and made the films he's now most known for. (And if this title seems particularly familiar these days, by the way, it's because there's a new comedic stage version of the story playing on Broadway right now, in which four actors play every single part in a gonzo quick-change style.) Just the title alone invokes strange and pleasant emotions to us fans of turn-of-the-century "weird" fiction, of foggy nights and mysterious stairways, and it's a project I've been looking forward to for a long time now.

And indeed, let me confess that the novella doesn't disappoint at all, or at least to existing fans of that transitional period of arts history; because that's something important to remember about The 39 Steps as you read it, that much like GK Chesterton or the Futurist art movement, this was penned in a strange twenty-year period in history (1900 to 1920) that fell directly between Romanticism and Modernism, a period that basically bridged these two movements precisely through wild experimentation and the birth of many of our modern artistic "genres." It is a crucial book to read, for example, if you are a fan of mysteries, secret-agent thrillers and the like; it's one of the books that literally defined those genres, a step above and beyond the pulpy "dime novels" that Buchan himself admits in the dedication was a major inspiration behind his own story. (Turns out that he and a friend were both guilty obsessive fans of pulp fiction, and thought it'd be funny to write their own homages; ironically, of course, it's this homage that is now much more known than the pulp stories that inspired it.)

The tale of bored young intellectual Richard Hannay, a British South African who has recently moved to London and just hates it, our hero is actually just about to move back home when he is suddenly swept into a world of international intrigue by his next-door neighbor, a paranoid little weasel named Scudder who claims to be an undercover agent of the government, and who has stumbled across a corporate/anarchist conspiracy to assassinate a minor Greek ambassador and thus trigger a global war*. Scudder ends up dying under mysterious circumstances while hiding in Hannay's apartment, leading to him getting framed for murder; and this is just enough of an excuse to get Hannay on the run, leading to the action-based plot that takes him from one side of the UK to the other, into and out of a series of traps, and even the object of a monoplane chase back when hardly any planes actually existed. It's an exciting tale, one with all the usual twists and turns we expect now from the genre, told in a competent style that shakes off the flowery Victorianism that at the time was just ending its dominance of the arts; a thoroughly modern novel, in other words, or I guess I should say "proto-modern," one of the many above-average projects from this transitional period of history to highly influence the mature Modernists who came after.

Twenty years later, then, a young Alfred Hitchcock realized what a great story this was as well, and how it so naturally fit the themes that he wanted to tackle in his films in the first place; that led to a movie version in the mid-'30s, which like I said was one of the first really big hits of his career, one of the things that led him to Hollywood a few years later and the films he is now much more known for. I have to admit, though, that I have a low tolerance for movies that are over 50 or 60 years in age, precisely because of all the cheesiness that comes with such films -- the ham-fisted acting, the stilted dialogue, the dated hairdos, the non-existent production values. It takes a pretty special film from this period to still hold my legitimate attention as a contemporary moviegoer (see, for example, my review of Fritz Lang's 1927 Metropolis, which is just so visually stunning you can't help but to still be fascinated by it); and Hitchcock's The 39 Steps is unfortunately just not one of those films, especially considering that huge portions of the original story were rewritten in order to appease a mainstream moviegoing crowd. (In the film version, for example, Hannay is saddled with a wisecracking love interest, something completely absent from the original novella.) It's definitely worth checking out if you're a fan of historical films (and by the way is in the public domain too -- you can watch the whole thing for free if you want over at Google Video); for most of you, however, I recommend simply reading the book, which to this day is still a corker of a tale.

Out of 10:Book: 8.3Movie: 7.2, or 8.2 for fans of pre-WWII films

*And in fact, since it's such an integral part of the plot, it's important before reading The 39 Steps to understand in general terms what caused World War I in the first place. In fact, I can give it to you in a nutshell: Basically, the way all the royal families of Europe kept the peace throughout the late 1800s and early 1900s was through an ultra-elaborate series of international treaties, with a country for example pledging to go to war on behalf of a friendly neighbor, if that neighbor ends up going to war themselves. The thinking, then, was that no individual country would ever declare war against another one under such circumstances, because of that country basically declaring war against half of Europe by doing so; and sure enough, after the assassination of a member of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1914, the retaliation by that empire against the kingdom of Serbia did indeed kick all these complicated treaties into motion, leading eventually to half of Europe fighting the other half of Europe for no particular reason at all, and with a total death toll of 20 million by the time the whole thing was over. The conspiracy behind The 39 Steps relies exactly on such a situation -- the assassination of a minor ambassador, leading to a global war because of all these international treaties -- which is why it's important to understand all this before reading the book. ...more

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com:]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com:]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally.)

The CCLaP 100: In which I read for the first time a hundred so-called "classics," then decide whether or not they deserve the label

Book #30: The Call of the Wild, by Jack London (1903)

The story in a nutshell:One of the first-ever anthropomorphized children's books, Jack London's 1903 Call of the Wild tells the tale of "Buck," a cross-bred dog (part Saint Bernard, part Scotch Shepherd) who begins our story as a pampered family pet in northern California*; what made this book unusual for its time, however, is that this story is actually told from the viewpoint and mindset of the dog itself, as Buck finds himself first kidnapped and then sold as a sled dog in the Yukon, right in the middle of that region's Industrial-Age gold rush, when hearty dogs were at a premium. The rest of this short book, then, is essentially a look at what happens to Buck within this environment, and how his formerly tame nature is slowly replaced with his inborn animal instinct, as we readers are introduced one at a time to the legitimate horrors that came with this lifestyle back then (starvation, exhaustion, cruel owners, hostile natives, bloody infighting for both survival and pecking order), with Buck by the end joining a pack of rogue Alaskan wolves and becoming a semi-mythical legend, among both the civilized humans and dogs who he leaves behind.

The argument for it being a classic:Well, to start with, it's one of the most popular children's books in history, with adaptations of the tale that continue to be created to this day (for example, a popular 3D movie version is being released on DVD the same exact week I'm writing this review); and then there's the fact that this was one of the first animal tales ever to be written from the point of view of the actual animal, a popular technique that in our modern times has become an entire subgenre unto itself. It can also be argued that this is a highly important historical record of the Alaskan gold rush, detailing the ins and outs of daily life there back then in a way that only a local could've (for those who don't know, London actually lived there himself for a time** starting in 1897); and let's not forget, its fans say, that this remains one of the few titles of the prolific London to still remain popular, out of the nearly hundred books he actually wrote, an author who was immensely important to the development of American literature in the early 20th century (not to mention insanely popular when he was alive), and who deserves to not be forgotten.

The argument against:Like many of the children's books included in this essay series, the main argument among its critics seems to be that this book is only still considered a "classic" in the first place because of tradition; that if you take an actual close look at the book itself, it is neither superlative in quality nor even that popular anymore, one of those titles more apt to be nostalgically reminisced upon by middle-agers than an actual good book to be read again and again in our contemporary times. This is part of the problem with the term "classic," after all, is that our definition of it is constantly changing from one generation to the next; and children's literature is particularly susceptible to this change in definition, in that it's children's books that have most changed in nature in the last hundred years. Although no one seems to be arguing anymore with the idea that this is a historically important book, there seems to be a growing amount of people saying that it isn't a timeless gem either, and that it's maybe time here in the early 2000s to retire its longstanding "classic" status.

My verdict:So out of the thirty books I've now reviewed for this essay series, this may be the hardest time I've had yet determining whether to classify a title as a "classic" or not. Because on the one hand, it's an undeniably thrilling book, a real page-turner that was a joy as a nostalgic middle-ager to read, and like I said is a fantastic look not just at the nature of the animal spirit but all the historical details of life in the Yukon during the gold-rush years. But on the other hand, the book is much, much more violent and dark than what most of us consider appropriate anymore for modern children, and parents deserve to know this before just handing a copy over to their kids; in fact, there's enough blood and death in this book to give just about any kid nightmares for weeks, making it ironically much more appropriate anymore for adults than contemporary children. Also, like any book that's over a hundred years old, there are big sections of Call of the Wild that simply feel outdated, and I question whether people would actually enjoy a title like this anymore if they're not reading specifically for historical reasons. As I mentioned, this is a big problem among a growing amount of children's literature that we once considered "classics," that in fact they're much more useful anymore as simple historical documents detailing a specific period in time, and aren't nearly as appropriate anymore for just handing to a modern kid, who after all has grown up with just a plethora of profoundly more sophisticated tales than such simplistic stories like these, and who aren't going to enjoy such stories nearly as much as a misty-eyed older adult looking back through the haze of nostalgia. It's for all these reasons that today I come down on the "no" side of the classic equation, although like I said, let it be known that I was right on the fence in this particular case.

*And a little piece of trivia, by the way: London based this book on his landlord's pet dog, back when he lived in northern California himself during the height of the Yukon gold rush, a Saint Bernard that the families would regularly hook up to a wagon and have help perform household chores.

**And if you really want to read something fascinating, check out sometime the actual derring-do life of London himself, who had real adventures in his youth twice as crazy as any of the stories he wrote: the illegitimate child of an astrologer and a mentally insane spiritualist, as a teenager he bought his first boat (borrowing money from the ex-slave who raised him) and became an oyster farmer, then after high school became a seal clubber in Japan for awhile; then during his years as a Yukon gold miner he developed scurvy and almost died, becoming a socialist by the end of his time there because of a liberal doctor who saved his life, and eventually becoming one of the first Americans in history to be able to make his entire living just from creative writing alone (and indeed, one of only a few handfuls of Americans to this day to become a millionaire from his creative writing). Sheesh! ...more

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com:]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com:]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)

The CCLaP 100: In which I read for the first time a hundred so-called "classics," then write reports on whether or not they deserve the label

Essay #47: All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), by Erich Maria Remarque

The story in a nutshell:Originally published serially the year before, Erich Maria Remarque's 1929 All Quiet on the Western Front concerns the events of World War One a decade previous, and in particular the insanely long battlefront running almost the entire length of western Europe that the war became most known for, in which both sides lined up millions of soldiers along an unmoving border that stretched literally from Scandinavia to Spain Belgium to Switzerland, where over the course of four years the armies died in numbers scarcely ever seen in human history before, because of clueless generals applying 19th-century strategies (like endless frontal assaults and thousands of miles of defensive ditches) to a war full of 20th-century technology (like machine guns, barbed wire, biological weapons and a lot more). Much like Oliver Stone's Platoon, then, Remarque's book is not known so much for its plot than for its astute and unblinking look at the actual warfront environment, establishing for the first time many of the elements that eventually became staples of war fiction -- the chaotic terror of the actual fighting, the maddening monotony of the non-combat times, the pure randomness of war-related death, and the moments of surrealistic humor that can nonetheless be regularly found within such environments. Although it's tempting now to dismiss the novel as a series of cliche-filled vignettes, it's important to remember that this was the title that created many of these cliches in the first place -- a book that spelled out the very horrors that returning soldiers found impossible to share with friends and family, which is precisely why their friends and family devoured the book so voraciously when it first came out -- all told through the filter of our introspective teenage hero Paul Baumer, as over the course of half a decade he watches literally every person he went to high school with eventually get killed, with even Baumer himself succumbing in a random and unremarkable way by the end.

The argument for it being a classic:Well, as mentioned, according to its fans, there's a pretty simple argument for why this book should be considered a classic; it's demonstrably the very first novel to establish so many of the tropes now found in almost all modern creative projects concerning war, including not only the examples already mentioned but also the older rah-rah schoolmaster who gets all the boys whipped up for combat in the first place, and the concept of a returning soldier finding it almost impossible to reconnect with his old life once getting home from active duty. Plus the book has a strong connection to both Hollywood's past and future, with the 1930 adaptation being the very first non-musical "talkie" to ever win the Best Picture Oscar, and with a brand-new big-budget adaptation in the works as we speak, starring Daniel "Harry Potter" Ratcliffe; plus it's an important landmark of the Early Modernist arts as well, say its fans, the book that inspired the term "Lost Generation" through Baumer's remarkable monologue about halfway through, on how he and all his school buddies left for the war as naive children who thought they understood the way the world worked, but were returning as scarred adults who have lost the ability to understand how polite society even works, shades of the Tropic of Cancer "Jazz Age" times just around the corner. And then there's the fact that the Nazis were so threatened by this book, it was one of the first they banned after gaining power in the 1930s, even going so far as to cut off Remarque's sister's head in retribution for Remarque himself successfully escaping to America; and if the Nazis hated it this much, there's gotta be something to it almost by default, right?

The argument against:Not much, to tell you the truth; although like most books that are considered classics, you find a fair share of people online complaining about being forced to read this in high school under unpleasant circumstances, which pretty much ruined whatever chance they had to enjoy it. But that's not really a complaint about the book so much as it is about their old high-school lit teacher, so am not sure how appropriate it really is.

My verdict:As regular readers know, after three years we're finally approaching the halfway point of the CCLaP 100, at which point I plan on writing a long essay about everything I've now learned from the process, including a series of lists such as the titles I've been most enjoyably surprised by; and All Quiet on the Western Front definitely earns a spot on such a list, a shockingly powerful book to this day which is not exactly the anti-war screed its fans claim it is, but rather becomes one by default for so unflinchingly detailing the random, utterly unglamorous brutality that comes with war. And indeed, this was one of the many surprises I had with this novel, was learning just how many military veterans love it themselves, precisely for being one of the most realistic depictions of life along an actual battlefront ever written, which when combined with its poetic Modernist elements makes it still such an affecting winner, even 81 years after its original publication. (And for an excellent example of the "poetic Modernist elements" I'm talking about, see the whole section near the end where Baumer gets caught in an enemy foxhole during an artillery attack, is forced to kill a French soldier at close range, then is stuck with the corpse in the hole for four straight days without food, which drives him so insane that he starts holding conversations with the dead man and promising to deliver his personal effects to his widow after the war is over, a temporary insanity that he quickly comes out of again once being reunited with his buddies. If that isn't one of the most effectively bizarre war anecdotes ever written, I don't know what is.)

Although not exactly a textbook example of Early Modernism when it comes to style, and in fact displaying at points more of an affinity for the now-hated Genteel literature of the same period ("Ah! Mother, Mother! How can it be that I must part from you? Here I sit and there you are lying"...sheesh), this is very much a touchstone of Modernism in terms of expanding the scope of what was allowed to be discussed in "polite company," and it's hard to imagine how we would even have such modern classics as Saving Private Ryan and the like without this trailblazer paving the way. It's not only an undeniable classic, but will probably end up as one of my ten personal favorites of the entire series once it's all over, and it comes strongly recommended today for just about everyone out there.

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)

The CCLaP 100: In which I read for the first time a hundred so-called "classics," then write reports on whether or not they deserve the label

Essay #55: Babbitt (1922), by Sinclair Lewis

The story in a nutshell:The follow-up to his surprise smash bestseller Main Street, Sinclair Lewis' 1922 Babbitt is basically a continuation of his searing indictment regarding the hypocrisies inherent in middle-class Midwestern society in the years between World War One and the Great Depression, known to us now as the "Roaring Twenties" and which conjures up images of flappers, illegal hooch and fur-coat-wearing undergraduates. Set in the fictional mid-sized industrial powerhouse of Zenith, Winnemac*, it tells the story of one George Babbitt, a pudgy, milquetoast, pink-faced realtor who's the very living embodiment of everything Lewis hated, as we watch during the first half of this novel while he bumbles his way through a typical work week -- where appearances and superficialities count for everything, chamber-of-commerce boosterism has become the new state religion (and the Elks and Kiwanis the new churches), and even the slightest hint of labor reform is treated as a city-destroying godless communist threat that must be extinguished at all cost.

Ah, but in the second half, we watch as a series of events call into question for Babbitt the infallibility of these former bedrocks in his life, including his best friend having a mental breakdown and shooting his wife, as well as an affair Babbitt himself embarks upon with a left-leaning bohemian; so when Babbitt starts appearing in public with these menaces to society, needless to say that his fellow community leaders don't react well at all, essentially forming a McCarthyesque morals organization for the sole purpose of bullying Babbitt back into the fold, or else face a near-total boycott of the properties he's currently trying to sell. His spirit broken, the dimwitted Babbitt is indeed brought back to the status quo by the end of the book, convincing himself that his former excursions into the wild side of life were foolish and that he had given them up voluntarily; but at least the novel ends on a hopeful note, as Babbitt ends up sticking up for his son's right to lodge petty protests against various details of his upcoming wedding, showing a spark of rebellion still buried deep in our genial antihero, leading us to only guess at how this might have manifested itself in him as the good times of the '20s gave way to the horrors of the '30s and '40s.

The argument for it being a classic:Well, for starters, Lewis was one of the first Americans to ever receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, mostly for a string of unprecedented successes he had all through the 1920s, a whole series of bitter screeds about middle-class Protestant conformity that were (to the shock of everyone) eagerly eaten up in the millions by the very self-hating middle-class Midwesterners he was trashing, a whole string of bestsellers that each had a more contentious relationship with academes and especially the Pulitzer committee than it might seem at first. (Main Street actually won the award the year it came out, but then was revoked at the last second by conservative judges on a technicality and given to Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence instead; so when Lewis' next novel after this one, Arrowsmith, actually did win the Pulitzer for real, in a self-righteous huff he turned it down.) And indeed, as we approach the hundredth anniversary of his most well-known novels, it's becoming clear that Lewis drew the virtual blueprint for so much of the 20th-century literature that came after him, with a strong argument to be made that neither Tom Perrotta nor Jonathan Franzen would've even had careers if not for books like this one paving the way. An astute and slyly funny look at the psychologically corrosive nature of the safe and bland, and of just how much violence must be used to actually maintain this bland safety (a theme Lewis would ratchet up even more in such later novels as Elmer Gantry and It Can't Happen Here), fans argue that it's time we stand up and finally acknowledge just what an impact on the 20th-century arts Lewis had, a tremendously influential writer in his day who fell into obscurity during the Postmodernist era, but who deserves now to be acknowledged for the way he so deftly predicted how the rest of the "American Century" would proceed after his own time.

The argument against:Critics of Babbitt -- and there's a lot of them -- would snort derisively after reading the above paragraph, and ask if they had actually read the same book that its fans had; because as far as they're concerned, the novel is nothing more than a tawdry bit of badly dated pop-culture, nearly impossible to even read just 89 years later because of the ridiculous amount of period slang used in its dialogue. (And indeed, it was this slang that made Lewis such a huge hit in Europe, where his books actually came with glossaries in the back.) And besides, they ask, should we really be honoring Lewis in the first place for inventing the now overused genre known as the Big Bad Suburbs? Hasn't this in fact turned into one of the most tired, hackneyed cliches in all of modern literature, and shouldn't we actually be cursing both Lewis and the snotty academes of Early Modernism (the first generation of academes to even acknowledge novels as actual art forms) for legitimizing something in the "serious" arts that should've never been legitimized in the first place? A sneakily commercial writer who was merely spoon-feeding the light punishment that a spoiled, corrupt, overly rich American middle-class wanted to foist on itself in the 1920s, in order to make itself feel better for being so spoiled and corrupt in the first place, critics claim that there's a very good reason Lewis' career collapsed and never recovered after the onset of the Great Depression, which is that his early hits were merely what people at that exact moment in history wanted to hear, not great works of literature unto themselves, making the idea of Babbitt being a timeless classic laughable at best.

My verdict:Of the many surprises I've learned about literary history since starting this essay series, definitely one of them is just how far back the tradition goes of angry artists denouncing the sleepy, conforming nature of middle-class societies living on the edges of large urban centers, which if this were the Bible you could express along the lines of, "And thus did Gustave Flaubert begat Thomas Hardy, and thus did Hardy begat Sherwood Anderson, and thus did Anderson begat Lewis, and thus did Lewis begat John Cheever, and thus did Cheever begat American Beauty;" and that just unto itself makes Lewis fascinating and worth paying attention to, precisely because this was so thoroughly forgotten about him during the countercultural upheavals of the 1960s, '70s and '80s, when his scathing critiques disguised as white-guy rah-rahs fell out of favor with an artistic community seeking something radically different. But that said, what critics posit about Lewis' actual writing style is definitely true as well, and I confess that I found it a chore to even make it through Babbitt, despite being amazed at how relevant the storyline itself is to the exact times we're currently living in.

So how exactly does one judge all this in the end? Certainly Lewis is an author just on the cusp of a big new historical reassessment and appreciation, as the slow increase of mentions of him you see these days in artistic circles attest; but certainly you should take the books themselves with a grain of salt, and understand that they were so fawned over at the time by academes and Europeans simply for the newness of the language he deployed, a running theme of Early American Modernism whether it's William Faulkner, Henry Miller or Ernest Hemingway you're talking about. And that's why today I am declaring Babbitt with a bit of hesitancy to indeed be a classic, at least for now, although caution readers that some of you might dislike this book rather intensely, yet another truism regarding so much of the work from this experimental period of arts history. All of these Jazz Age novels of Lewis' are worth visiting if you never have before (and especially Gantry, which virtually defined the tropes of every televangelist parody that's ever been written since), but don't complain to me if you get tripped up in his endless "23-skidoo" dialogue.

*And in fact, it's the invention of the fictional Midwestern state Winnemac that might very well turn out to be Lewis' most lasting legacy, his brilliant solution for getting to trash the Midwest without any actual Midwesterners becoming offended; the setting for all his novels following Babbitt as well, it's located in a space that in real life comprises upper Indiana/Ohio and lower Michigan, with its largest city "Zenith" being a stand-in for any number of large Midwestern industrial centers around it, from Detroit to Cincinnati to Milwaukee to St. Louis. Ironically, despite how terribly he portrayed the citizens of Zenith, Midwestern cities in the 1920s used to have actual bragging contests over which of them was its real-life inspiration. ...more

although i am mostly a fan of cutting-edge and very contemporary fiction, i also have a weak spot for victorian and edwardian class-conscious britishalthough i am mostly a fan of cutting-edge and very contemporary fiction, i also have a weak spot for victorian and edwardian class-conscious british satirists, and it doesn't get much better when it comes to that than pg wodehouse. his series of wooster and jeeves tales have not only been adapted numerous times in all kinds of media, but even sparked the cultural understanding of "jeeves" automatically standing for a butler -- they're that well-known. highly worth checking out if you're just starting to get into the genre (as well as george bernard shaw and em forster), this should be on everyone's "classics" checked-off list....more

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)

The CCLaP 100: In which I read for the first time a hundred so-called "classics," then write reports on whether or not they deserve the label

Essay #64: The Jungle (1906), by Upton Sinclair

The story in a nutshell:(Much of today's plot recap was cribbed from Wikipedia, for reasons that will become clearer below.) Originally published in 1906, Upton Sinclair's The Jungle is a sprawling look at the typical immigrant experience in America back then, before most of the laws regarding things like workplace safety, minimum wage and city zoning had been created; following a family of twelve who have recently arrived in Chicago from their troubled home of Lithuania, Sinclair's main point is to show that, unlike the rose-tinted tales of gold-paved streets and self-determination that were the common narrative among capitalists back then, in fact an unregulated free-market system is designed from its very core to exploit the poor and uneducated, that in fact such a system wouldn't even work if it wasn't for the ease in which such people can be manipulated and taken advantage of. And so do we watch in growing horror as our hapless English-challenged hero Jurgis Rudkus first gets swindled out of all his money, then gets evicted from a slum, then faces a living nightmare in his job at the infamous Chicago Stockyards, then has his wife die during childbirth because they can't afford a doctor, then has his son die by literally drowning in mud in the middle of a public street, then becomes a bitter drifter and hobo, before finally having his soul saved by almost accidentally falling in with a group of socialist agitators, the book ending on a bright note as our author stand-in envisions out loud a future world that is fair and equal to all.

The argument for it being a classic:There's a simple argument to be made for why The Jungle should be considered a classic, claim its large cadre of passionate fans, which is the massive influence it had on the real world -- namely, people at the time were so horrified by its stomach-churning accounts of the meatpacking industry, the US formed the Food & Drug Administration directly because of it, which over the decades has become one of the most important and powerful government agencies in the entire country. That's an astounding reaction to a simple, small melodrama by a semi-obscure writer, the equivalent perhaps of a random tech-blogger in North Dakota singlehandedly convincing Congress to declare the internet a public utility and ban all private cable companies; and the reason the book managed to accomplish this, they say, is because of being so powerful and heartbreaking, one of the best examples you'll ever find of the then-new "Social Realist" literary style which would go on to inspire pretty much an entire generation of politically motivated authors in the 1920s and '30s. A book that does exactly what it aims to do -- that is, make its readers angry and disgusted at the appalling way blue-collar workers were treated in an age before social-welfare laws -- The Jungle is a prime example of the novel format's ability to do things besides just tell an entertaining tale, an ability that was only being seriously explored in this format for the very first time in these years, yet another reason this groundbreaker should be considered an undeniable classic that every person should read before they die.

The argument against:To understand the problem in general with The Jungle, say its critics, simply look at that specific tale its fans tell about it inspiring the formation of the FDA, and how that's not really all of the story when you stop and examine it; how as even Sinclair himself lamented many times in his later years, the whole point of his book was supposed to be to show off the inherent evil of a capitalist middle class and to inspire a violent socialist revolution to overcome them, while the reaction from the actual capitalist middle class was to be horrified at the condition of the food they were putting into their mouths, while continuing to not give a toss about the people who actually worked at these factories, or about any of the other 75 percent of this novel that doesn't have to directly do with the subject of workplace cleanliness. And so while it's admirable that the book had the kind of real-world influence that it did, its critics claim, that's really something more for history class than the world of the arts; and that the novel taken just on its own is actually pretty terrible, an overly serious doom-n-gloomer that never just makes its points when it can instead write those points down on a wooden two-by-four and then beat you in the back of the head repeatedly with it as hard as humanly possible. ("CAPITALISM IS BAD!" WHACK!!! "CAPITALISM IS BAD!" WHACK!!! "CAPITALISM IS BAD!" WHACK!!! And sheesh, the less we talk about the twenty-page literal sermon on socialism that Sinclair uses to end the book, the better.) A writer who these days would be just as unknown as the hundreds of other hacky schlockmeisters churning out "poor lil' immigrant" stories in those same years, if it hadn't been for its accidental success in exposing the meatpacking industry at the exact moment in history when it needed to be, The Jungle is certainly a book to be admired but not necessarily to be read anymore, say its critics, and it's the perpetual assigning of this badly-written book in high-school lit classes that's partly to blame for so many Americans despising literature by the time they're done with school.

My verdict:So leaving aside today the question of their actual politics (which to be clear, I'm also not a fan of), I've discovered over the years a big common problem with most of the artistic projects made by radical liberals, an issue that came up yet again while I was reading John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath for this essay series last year; namely, that radical liberals tend to lack even the slightest understanding of subtlety or humor, which makes nearly every artistic project ever made by a radical liberal (from Great Depression novels to Michael Moore documentaries) a joyless, patronizing chore, not enjoyable on its own but something we're usually literally forced to endure, because it's supposedly important and good for us and beneficial to society. (Although to be fair, most artistic projects by radical conservatives suffer from the exact same problems; it's not the left or right I have a particular problem with, but rather those who claim that a political purpose excuses an artistic project from needing to have any artistic merit.) And so it is with The Jungle as well, which I plainly confess is one of the handful of books in this essay series I eventually gave up on long before actually finishing, after first spending an entire month reading it and still not being able to choke down even fifty pages of the dreck.

And to make it clear that I'm not the only one who feels this way, let's remember that no less than TIME magazine once called Sinclair "a man with every gift except humor and silence;" because that in a nutshell is what reading The Jungle is like, a ponderous accidental self-parody that is just so unrelenting and overly obvious in portraying the inner sweetness and outer misery of its main characters, you can't help sometimes but to laugh at inappropriate moments at its sheer sense of outrageousness. Like I said, there used to be literally thousands of such writers, and hundreds of them once nationally famous, back when the entire "Social Realism" movement reached its height in the 1910s through '30s, and now with all but a handful of them completely forgotten by society and history at large; and that's for the same reason that only a handful of poetry slammers from the 1990s and early 2000s will be remembered a hundred years from now, the same reason that we humans compile these kinds of "classics" lists in the first place, because ultimately what entertains a crowd of contemporaries in the heat of the original moment is far from the same thing that makes a piece of writing stay relevant for years and decades afterwards. The simple fact is that The Jungle is not even an ounce better than any of those other hundreds of forgotten melodramas that were cranked out in those same years, and that it really is only remembered at all anymore because of the effect it had on the real topic of workplace hygiene; and I agree with its critics that this isn't nearly enough of a reason to consider a book a timeless classic, which is why I firmly come down in the negative on the subject today. Definitely check it out if it sounds up your alley, but feel more than free to skip if you don't and still consider yourself a decent human being.

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)

The CCLaP 100: In which I read for the first time a hundred so-called "classics," then write reports on whether or not they deserve the label

Essay #65: The Magnificent Ambersons (1918), by Booth Tarkington

The story in a nutshell:Originally published in 1918, Booth Tarkington's The Magnificent Ambersons tells a story familiar to that time, about the vast changes that had happened in America between the Civil War of the 1860s and then, as the nation first turned from an agricultural to an industrial economy and then brought resulting things like public education, indoor plumbing and electricity to the interior "heartland" of the country for the first time. Set in the fictional city of Midland but in reality a thinly veiled version of Tarkington's hometown of Indianapolis, we follow this history by basically following the fate of one super-rich family over the course of these decades -- one of the "founding families" of this city who helped maintain the genteel, agriculture-based aristocracy that used to run such little civilized patches out in the middle of the rural wilds of the Midwest, until the Industrial Revolution replaced them wholesale with an entirely new upper class of brash entrepreneurs, and with their former wealth of desirable land and vast farms quickly made worthless by the invention of cars, highways, public transportation and the very idea of suburbs.

As such, then, our particular story concentrates on just one member of this family, poor George Amberson Minafer (carrier of his father's name but heir to his mother's fortune), who ends up getting the short end of the stick from both sides of the historical ruler -- prepared by an overly doting mother for an old-money life as a spoiled blue-blood, blowing off his college years because of feeling like his real adult job will be to look after his family estate (not to "hold" a "job" like some commoner), it's his arrogant, unwavering belief in the unchanging nature of this old system that leads to so many problems when the changes actually occur, with the author cleverly using the rise of the automobile as an ongoing symbol of this change all through the course of this manuscript. (When given a chance to invest in the industry when they're first invented at the beginning of the book, George blows them off as a fad for the bored elite, and declares that nothing will ever beat the financial stability of large estates near the the center of town; while by the end of the book, it's precisely the explosive popularity of these 'horseless carriages' that have made his family's land a virtually worthless slum area of the rapidly growing city, exactly the same thing that happened for example in Chicago's Prairie Avenue neighborhood in those same years.) Throw in an on-and-off relationship with a feisty, independent neighbor, a kowtowed aunt who seems to be the only sane one of the entire family (and hence the one most completely ignored), and wistful descriptions of a slow-moving 19th-century "golden age" for the American Midwest (based on Tarkington's real-life childhood as a member of one of these ruined old aristocratic families), and you're left with a story in turns infuriating and pity-provoking, a simultaneous paen to progress and elegy for what is invariably lost in the process.

The argument for it being a classic:Well, for starters, it was the winner of the 1919 Pulitzer Prize, with Tarkington in general one of only three people in history who have won the Pulitzer more than once; plus there's the celebrated 1942 movie version by no less than Orson Welles, the fact that it made the Modern Library's "100 Best Novels of the 20th Century" list, and the fact that this was in the top-ten bestselling novels in the nation every year for an entire decade after first getting published. And that's because, fans claim, this is a blessedly clean and straightforward look at one of the more important periods of American history, essentially a period much like India is going through right this second -- when the US went from basically a big mass of mostly lawless rural villages to a legitimately unified and industrialized nation, with both all the good and all the bad things that come with such a transition, the "Great Change" that basically turned the American Midwest into the modern collection of industrial powerhouses and bland surrounding suburbs that we now know it as today. If you want an entertaining, plain-spoken look at this transition, without all the head-scratching experimentation that bogs down so many of his peers' works from those same years, just turn to what was for a long time one of the most popular novels in this country's history, the very definition of literary classic.

The argument against:Critics of The Magnificent Ambersons tend to take the same facts its fans do but then posit the opposite argument; that the reason this hasn't held up very well over the years is precisely because it's missing all the "fancy-schmancy experimentation" that his peers in the 1910s and '20s were including; or put another way, the phenomenon known as Modernism, which would quickly become the singlemost defining trait of the American arts for the entire rest of the 20th century. While not exactly Victorian in nature, critics argue, Tarkington certainly missed the boat when it came to the grand tide of history that the arts were going through during his lifetime; and while his Henry-James-inspired Realist tone was rightly loved by his contemporary audiences, hungry for work that spoke in the same language as them and discussing the hot issues of the day, it's this same tone that made his work fall so flat almost the exact moment his original audience died out, leaving us with what is certainly a fascinating historical document but nothing you could reasonably argue that every single person should one day read before they die, the way that we're defining "classic" in this particular essay series.

My verdict:Oh, have you never actually heard of Booth Tarkington before? Yeah, same with me until first putting this CCLaP 100 list together, and including in that list a few completely random and forgotten Pulitzer winners from the past, simply to see for curiosity's sake why they had won the Pulitzer and why they were then forgotten again so quickly. And indeed, this reading experience surprisingly ties in nicely with something making the rounds of the blogosphere just this week, when a professional book collector over at BookRiot.com controversially declared that in a hundred years, no one's going to have even the slightest clue who Jonathan Franzen is; because The Magnificent Ambersons in many ways made me exactly think of a 1920s Jonathan Franzen, and made me realize a lot more what this essayist at BookRiot was trying to say. Because the fact is that the book is really not that bad at all, a quickly paced and not too challenging generational story, that feels more important in the heat of the reading moment than it probably is because of taking on such a grand theme, and using the exact same kind of slang and dialogue style that was popular among real society at that exact moment in history; and these are all great things when it comes to contemporary audiences seeking contemporary works that speak directly to them, and we should rightly celebrate Tarkington for once literally being more popular in this country than Mark Twain, just as we should celebrate Franzen for having no less than the President of the United States quietly ask one day for an illegal early copy of Franzen's newest novel a few years ago, at a random bookstore while on vacation.

But if you compare The Magnificent Ambersons to just two other novels in the same years and exploring the same issues, Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio and Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence, it's impossible to deny that Tarkington comes up woefully and profoundly lacking; and that in a nutshell is the danger of declaring a book a "classic" at too early a moment in history, the whole reason we find it important to even make classics lists in the first place, because it's only the process of time and future generations that can tell us what history ultimately finds most important about our own era, and which of the artists of this era were to contain the strange spark that went on to define the entire generation after them. That's what makes it so fascinating right this exact moment in history to be exploring this particular literary time of just about a century ago, because this is the exact last moment in history that many of these books will even be argued as classics by anyone in the first place; and that makes it extremely interesting to read up on such people as Tarkington, Sinclair Lewis, Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair and more, in that who knows whether anyone will even remember these writers at all in another fifty years from now. Although I definitely recommend reading it, since it's a quick and easy read that nicely illuminates this particular period of history, I can't in good conscience declare The Magnificent Ambersons an undeniable classic, and in fact suspect that in just another couple of generations this debate won't even be taking place at all.

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this review, as well as the owner of(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this review, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)

When I first signed up for a review copy of this book, I had been under the mistaken impression that it was a contemporary novel about the old-fashioned foibles of British small-town life, ala Posy Simmonds' delightful Tamara Drewe from just a few years ago; it was only after receiving it that I realized it's actually a reprint of a book written way back in 1934, by one of those authors who were enormously popular in their day but quickly became obscure after their death. So as such, this already only mediocre book then leaves a lot more to be desired when viewed through modern eyes; and while I'm an avowed fan of other gentle British humorists from this time period (P.G. Wodehouse is a good example), Stevenson was no P.G. Wodehouse, and this so-so meta tale (about a dowdy woman who brings infamy to her small town by writing a tell-all novel that becomes a national bestseller) unfortunately reads at points more like a Simpsons parody of pre-war British comedies than a sincere pre-war British comedy. Checking out other people's reviews of this at Goodreads.com, I noticed that the word "cozy" kept coming up over and over in fans' write-ups, which I suppose is as good a way as any to describe this book in a nutshell -- an ultimately empty piece of fluff that even its fans admit they love more for the easy comfort of nostalgia than for its actual quality. It should be kept in mind when deciding whether or not to read it yourself.

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this review, as well as the owner of(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this review, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)

It's "Thin Man" week here at CCLaP! And in fact, it was pure but lucky coincidence that the original 1934 novel came up in my "CCLaP 100" reading queue this month, which I then followed up with a screening of the equally famous 1934 movie; because it just so happens that a brand-new contemporary book on the subject came to the top of my reading queue this month as well, the fascinating Return of the Thin Man edited by Richard Layman and Julie M. Rivett. See, even though The Thin Man would be the last novel Dashiell Hammett ever wrote, the resulting film version turned out so popular that movie studio MGM hired Hammett to write "treatments" for the next two sequels (After the Thin Man and Another Thin Man), not exactly stories and not exactly scripts, but rather if someone was describing a script in story form, neither of which have ever been published until this book this year. And so of course that makes this a must-read for Hammett fans, because it's not going to be very often anymore that they're going to come across unpublished work by him*; but of equal interest to history buffs are the lengthy contemporary essays that appear before and after each treatment, in which films scholars Layman and Rivett detail all the steps that went into making these films, their ultimate fates with both the studio and the public, and the cantankerous relationship the runaway alcoholic Hammett had with his MGM bosses, leading them to unceremoniously dump him after Another Thin Man and to hire journeyman writers to pen the last three scripts in the series. A fast, punchy and entertaining read, just like all of Hammett's work, this comes recommended to both hardboiled detective fans and those interested in the history of early cinema.

Out of 10: 9.0

*Although of course I shouldn't speak too soon; just last year, for example, a Hammett scholar unearthed a dozen unpublished short stories of his in the Hammett Archives at the University of Texas-Austin, which I believe are in the process of being turned into a brand-new book as we speak. ...more

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this review, as well as the owner of(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this review, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)

(CCLaP's rare-book service [cclapcenter.com/rarebooks] recently auctioned off a first edition, first printing copy of Sinclair Lewis' 1929 Dodsworth. Below is the write-up I did for the book's description.)

Poor Sinclair Lewis! Once one of the most celebrated writers on the planet, for an unprecedented string of commercial hits in the 1920s making vicious fun of the bored, corrupt, empty-headed middle class of the American Midwest, all of them turned into bestsellers precisely by the self-hating middle-classers he was making fun of, Lewis' career went quickly sour upon the start of the Great Depression, when these suddenly broke middle-classers found themselves being punished enough by life in general, and no longer needed his finger-wagging to produce the painless punishment that was assuaging their guilt throughout the "Roaring Twenties." But now that we're about to approach the centennial celebrations of these early hits, it's time that a new cultural assessment of Lewis be made, and that he be acknowledged as a sharp futurist who has a lot to say about our own times; because in reality you can strongly argue that he was the Jonathan Franzen of his times, a critically adored author (the first American writer in history to win the Nobel Prize, for example) who nonetheless heavily employed the pop culture and slang of his day in order to create devastating indictments against the consumerism, celebrity worship and herd mentality surrounding him, eaten up in the millions by the very people most guilty of the behavior, because they're able to recognize in these indictments every single person they know besides themselves, the problem that led to the Great Depression just as surely as it did in our own times to the 2008 Economic Meltdown.

Dodsworth was the last of these great hits, released just a few months before the stock market crash of 1929, and in a nutshell can be called "Lewis meets Henry James;" centered around Sam Dodsworth, the fifty-something founder of the hugely successful car manufacturer in Zenith* who has just sold the entire thing to a thinly disguised General Motors, now that he's "retired" his forty-something wife convinces him to go on an old-fashioned Grand Tour of Europe, just like rich Americans have been doing since the Victorian Age if they want to consider themselves truly cultured. (And note, by the way, that this would be the last period in history that this would be true, one of the many elements that makes this almost more important now as a historical document than as a piece of popular fiction; after the destruction of Europe and the ascendency of America at the end of World War Two, the global headquarters of culture quickly shifted to the US and specifically New York, and it suddenly became passe among rich Americans to take European grand tours anymore.) The simple plot, then, follows the same structure as so many of Lewis' novels from the '20s; our narrator starts as the living embodiment of whatever Lewis is trying to criticize (in this case, the business-focused, proudly ignorant American, forced on an unending parade of interchangeable cathedral visits and appalled by the lack of modern creature comforts now taken for granted in nearly every large American city), but after being exposed to the good things from that new environment (including, as always, the potential love of an enticingly independent modern woman) he slowly becomes a convert, just to be shunned by his former peers as pressure to "return to the fold."

And as mentioned, this is perhaps why collectors are best off thinking of this as an important historical document, rather than to focus on its admittedly only so-so quality as a novel; because given that Sam's payment for Dodsworth Motors would've likely been just a little cash but a whole lot of stock, it's fascinating to realize that in the real world, he would've been bankrupted just a few months after the events of this book take place, and that he suddenly would have a whole lot more to worry about than pompous Brits, brash expats, and how all those dirty artists in the Left Bank were always getting in his way. That's the treasure of this book in general, that it's a snapshot of a moment in history right before an unexpected period of tremendous upheaval, with none of the characters (nor even the author) even remotely aware that such upheaval is about to take place; note for example Sam's ho-hum attitude towards the pre-power Fascists he meets in Europe, or how one of the biggest sources of conflict is whether Sam is going to accept the high-powered VP position of the new conglomerate at home next year, or blow another million on staying at five-star hotels across the Continent for yet another year, a much more historically naked treat than any revisionist "winds of change" novel written after the fact. Lewis' fans in his own lifetime turned on him for this, but it's time that we restore the respect and fame he deserves for being such an astute prognosticator; and with this copy of Dodsworth being auctioned at a deliberately low starting bid to encourage an actual sale, this is a fine choice for a collector who wishes to "beat the odds" before this re-lionization of Lewis takes place next decade.

*For those who don't know, Lewis set many of his novels in the fictional Midwestern state of Winnemac, which was supposed to be sorta southish of Michigan and sorta northish of Indiana and Ohio; and Winnemac's version of Detroit or Cleveland or St. Louis was the industrial powerhouse of Zenith, where so many of his stories specifically take place. In fact, in Dodsworth Lewis makes almost a science-fiction author's amount of insider references to his now expansive alt-reality, name-dropping in casual conversations such former characters as George Babbitt and Elmer Gantry. ...more

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this review, as well as the owner of(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this review, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)

(In November 2012 CCLaP auctioned off a signed first-edition copy of Sherwood Anderson's Kit Brandon through our eBay account [cclapcenter.com/rarebooks]. Below is the description I wrote for the book's listing.)

Sherwood Anderson is better known these days for what he inspired than what he did; like fellow Chicago-connected writer Theodore Dreiser, he came of age as an artist at the end of the Victorian Age but didn't make his name until the decades after, for writing proto-Modernist tales that bridge these two eras just in time to profoundly influence the next generation of Modernists in the '20s and '30s who really cemented the tropes. His most famous is the rough, conceptually experimental story collection Winesburg, Ohio, but he has others that are actually better; take for example 1936's Kit Brandon, a nearly forgotten title now from near the end of his career, when society at large considered him somewhat of a has-been (except for the academic crowd, who never stopped adoring him), but when in hindsight we can now see that he was actually at the peak of his powers. A slippery "oral history" that sounds real but is ultimately fiction, done in the Social Realist style that was so popular at the time, it tells the story of our eponymous hero, a tomboy-beautiful hillbilly girl who at first tries to have a traditional career in the booming new industrial landscape of Appalachia, but who is eventually seduced into the sexy, dangerous world of Prohibition-era bootlegging, eventually becoming a folk legend among locals for the sheer number of times she's able to outwit and out-run the law.

As such, then, the main reason to treasure this novel is for the unflinching way it looks at Prohibition itself, informing us of the realities behind both the ban and subsequent rise in moonshine hooch that have now become forgotten in our present nostalgic haze; for as this book makes clear, almost nobody who supported Prohibition back then really thought that the ban would get rid of liquor altogether, but rather that it would simply make it so expensive that the working poor would no longer be able to afford it, thus eliminating the violence and crime among these mostly Irish and German unruly crowds that was the main selling point of Prohibition in the first place. But little did anyone realize just how scarily efficient these working poor would become at first producing mass quantities of cheap grain alcohol in the unwatched back woods of the vast American heartland, then easily shipping it nationwide through a sophisticated corporate-type network that would eventually come to be known as "organized crime;" and that's essentially what this book is, a complex and layered look at all these subjects through the prism of our "Bonnie without Clyde," including the acknowledgement that it was the changing landscape of the Midwest from agricultural to industrial that fueled a lot of this gray-market entrepreneuralism in the first place, and that Prohibition failed essentially because east-coast liberal elites vastly underestimated just how crafty and clever the working poor could actually be when they had to. It's a shame that Anderson never rose to the heights in his own times of such contemporary peers as John Steinbeck and Richard Wright, because his works are more nuanced and have a longer shelf life than most of the Social Realist writers of the period; so let's be grateful that the proper respect has finally been afforded to him in our own times, with this signed first edition being a great addition to any fan's library. ...more

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)

(As of October 2014, my arts center is selling a first edition, first printing of this book. [See more at (cclapcenter.com/rarebooks).] Below is the description I wrote for its eBay auction page.)

Booth Tarkington is of course no stranger to CCLaP's readers; an Indianapolis native who was once the biggest selling author in the entire United States, he is part of that group that the center holds a special candle of vigilance for, which for lack of a better term might be called "Former Midwestern Titans of Early Modernist Literature Who Have Now Been Nearly Completely Forgotten By Mainstream Society At Large." (See also from this club: Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair, Arthur Meeker, Harold Bell Wright, and more.) Here in the 21st century, Tarkington is remembered for only two books from his long and popular career, when he is remembered at all -- the Pulitzer-winning The Magnificent Ambersons (which like Anderson's Winesburg Ohio or Meeker's Prairie Avenue tells the history of a Midwestern's city's transition during the early 20th century from a sleepy rural town to an industrial powerhouse); and today's book up for auction, the massively popular childhood-hijinks tale Penrod, so popular in fact that it spawned two equally bestselling sequels and a whole host of blockbuster movie adaptations (including a musical version in 1951 that helped launch the film career of Doris Day). Essentially a ripoff -- or, er, I mean "loving homage" -- of Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer, and a book series that actually outsold Twain among Tarkington's contemporary audiences, Penrod is basically a series of genteel, humorous vignettes about the preteen scamp of the book's title, many of them centered around his ongoing complications and peer humility over being chosen as Lancelot for his school's coming stage production of the King Arthur legend. Now, granted, Tarkington's actual writing style here leaves a lot to be desired among 21st-century readers (among other troubling details, this book is filled with casual racism, thrown out so offhandedly that it ironically becomes an important teaching lesson in why racist stereotypes were so endemically accepted back then); but the book itself remains a hugely important historical document from the transitional time between Victorianism and Modernism, a title celebrating its 100th anniversary this year and one of the most popular books of its entire times. Being sold today at the premium price it deserves (copies in better condition and with the dust jacket sell for literally ten times as much), this is sure to be one of the jewels in the library of any collector of early 20th century American literature, a seminal title from a time in history when the American arts was still trying to decide what exactly it was going to be. ...more

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)

(As of November 2014, I am selling a first edition, first printing of this book through CCLaP's eBay account [cclapcenter.com/rarebooks]. Below is the description I wrote for the auction listing.)

Every once in awhile, a book collector will randomly come across something during their adventures that turns out to be really unique and interesting from a visual standpoint, but for which almost nothing in the collective online universe is known; take for example the 1925 novel The Lion Tamer, which appears to be the first and last novel ever published by Carroll E. Robb, and which came out with little fanfare from the revered Harper & Brothers back when such companies churned out simple morality tales like these by the dozen. And make no mistake, from the standpoint of writing quality, this is nothing more than a mediocre morality tale: a melodrama about a young man in a small town who has been known for years by the nickname "Lion Tamer," because of once standing down a circus lion that had gotten loose rather than let it attack his girlfriend, this courage is suddenly called into question when there is a steamboat full of recent school graduates that crashes and sinks one night on the edge of town, with our hero Mart Bannister surviving but many of his chummy pals not. Did he really abandon his friends to save his own skin, like his shell-shocked girlfriend contends? Will he move away in shame? Or will the love of a mysterious new woman allow him to get on with his life? It's not to find out the answers to these questions that a 21st-century collector might want to own this book; it's instead for the beautiful but delicate Expressionist woodblock dust jacket, for its excellent condition despite being almost a century old, and simply for its memorable, one-of-a-kind nature. Admittedly, a volume like this is never going to be worth much to a full-time dealer; but it serves as an amazing decorative object for book lovers who wish to have a few front-facing punctuations in the library they show off to guests at dinner parties, and it is being priced today specifically to appeal to such customers. A wistful acquisition simply because of its nearly completely obscure status within the history of American literature, don't let this hard-working little book slip into complete abandon, especially because of its pristine condition relative to its super-low price....more